Fireball (search engine)

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Fireball is a German search engine run by Fireball Labs GmbH, based in Munich. It is available in German and English and started in 1996 in Berlin. It began as Flipper, a project at Technische Universität Berlin for the Gruner + Jahr publishing house, and was renamed Fireball in 1997. That year, T-Online chose Fireball as its search engine. Fireball grew quickly, adding Firemail email and Paperball news search, and mostly showed German results (for international results it used AltaVista).

In March 2000, Lycos Europe bought Fireball, and development slowed. With the rise of Google, Fireball’s market share collapsed—from about 22% in 2000 to 10% in 2001, 2.5% in 2002, and 0.3% in 2005. In 2002 it ceased to be independent and was run by Lycos Europe. After Lycos Europe dissolved in 2009, Fireball was sold to Ambrosia AG in Switzerland, which ran it until 2016. In 2016 Munich investors bought Fireball, re-established it as an independent company, and relaunched a privacy-focused version of the service.